Farmhouses, fenced-in compounds, even the thick concrete of a penitentiary. Post-apocalyptic zombie fiction has taught us that these are good options for hiding out to protect your delicious brains from the undead, but eventually the zombies typically overrun the walls.

Fortunately, science has now provided a better long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction.

A team of researchers at Cornell University was inspired by the book "World War Z"by Max Brooks, as well as by a statistical-mechanics class, to model how an actual zombie outbreak might unfold. They will present their findings, meant to be an overview of modern epidemiology modeling, at a meeting of the American Physical Society on Thursday in San Antonio, Texas.

"Modeling zombies takes you through a lot of the techniques used to model real diseases, albeit in a fun context," Cornell graduate student Alex Alemi said in a release.